Journeys into a state of sound

A decade ago, Lyndon Terracini won wide acclaim for his stage adaptation of Peter Weir's film The Cars that Ate Paris. Now, as the artistic director of the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music, Terracini feels as though the car is eating him.

"I've driven 71,800 kilometres in Queensland in the past 18 months," he says.

For this year's event, all the state is a stage. More than 130 events are spread over 17 cities and towns. Before programming the festival, Terracini believed he had to get a feel for each community. So he hit the road. He learned that Queensland is big - very big - and that each town has its own culture, "which is something to celebrate", he says.

As part of that celebration, Mount Isa's mining heritage has been scooped up for a "love story" played out by heavy machines called Bob Cat Dancing, Rockhampton and Childers host pieces inspired by their communities, and the outback town of Winton has a musical fence designed by the percussionist Graeme Leak.

Terracini says initial scepticism about just another fence on the wide brown land was dissolved when Leak struck the tuned wires to play a local's request - Somewhere Over the Rainbow. "Others started coming up, wanting more requests," Terracini says.");document.write("

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The festival was launched on Friday, with the night air singing in both city and bush. A 1200-strong crowd came from near and very far to experience the guitarist Slava Grigoryan and a 54-piece symphony orchestra play in a shearing shed at Isisford in central Queensland. Back in Brisbane, Surrogate Cities by the German composer Heiner Goebbels received its Australian premiere at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre.

Surrogate Cities is a metropolis built from black dots and big ideas, and the audience is its residents. The journey through 10 suites is as sprawling, maddening, confronting and beguiling as life in a major city. And the music is as polyglot as what you would hear walking down George Street, veering from torch-song jazz to industrial noise, from hip-hop to the recorded voice of a cantor floating above strings.

Goebbels has thrown everything at constructing his sound and vision: an orchestra, two singers, sampled sounds and all sorts of objects to ruffle or bash, from newspapers to bunches of birch. In turn, the Queensland Orchestra and singers Jocelyn B.Smith and David Moss threw everything they had at the audience/residents. There were moments of beauty that dazzled and soared like the Chrysler Building, moments of percussive urgency and threat, as if we were about to be mugged, and many moments where beauty and menace coexisted.

The most extraordinary performance was by David Moss, whose improvised vocal turn lay somewhere between scatting and scary. Think Jim Carrey doing an impression of Ella Fitzgerald while being eaten by the creature from Alien.

If the greatest measure of a city's impact on its residents is how much they rave about it - rhapsodising, criticising, questioning - then Goebbels has nailed the effect of steel and smog on flesh and blood with his composition. The opening night audience could not stop talking about what they experienced in Surrogate Cities. That Brisbane has hosted its Australian premiere may also indicate how much this city has grown up.

The Big Percussion Concert on Saturday night was all action, virtually no talk. The Senegalese drummer Aly N'Diaye Rose told the crowd that he had been teaching his instrument to "talk English". But no language was required in this international celebration of crash and thump.

The Australian group Synergy weaved rhythms with the Egyptian tabla master Hossam Ramzy, whose skills spiked Western ears in the mid-'90s when he collaborated with Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. Ramzy and Synergy provided the heart-starter for the night, with polyrhythms ricocheting around the City Hall auditorium and penetrating bodies. This was music you could not but help feel.

The Turkish flautist Omar Faruk Tekbilek tempered the pace, his curling melodies conjuring up minarets and caravanserais. The images of the Middle East then sashayed onto centre stage when Ramzy's wife Serena performed a belly dance.

The foot was rarely off the energy pedal during the concert. TaikOz bounded on and traded synchronised blows on traditional Japanese drums. Their vigour is delightfully eye-opening as well as ear-ringing.

After an interval to catch some breath, Aly N'Diaye Rose, along with seven family members and friends, delivered more than an hour of rumbustious rhythm. The drummers tried to break down any remaining barrier between the stage and the audience by invoking chants. Unlike those performing, most of the crowd struggled with keeping time over the barrage of complex rhythms. It would have been better to just let N'Diaye Rose's drums do the singing.

At 3 hours, the Big Percussion Concert was too much of a good thing. By the time all the performers combined for the finale, the show was unravelling, depriving it of the big bang everyone was expecting.

The festival's unveiling of new work continues this week with tomorrow's world premiere in Townsville of Before Time

Could Change Us, a song cycle composed by Paul Grabowsky, with lyrics by poet Dorothy Porter.

The 16 songs will be performed by Katie Noonan, whose approach to music is as wide-ranging as her vocals. While best known as the lead singer of the pop band george, classically trained Noonan constantly takes her voice - and her audience - on adventures through opera, jazz and the avant-garde. Which is why she is so enthusiastic about Before Time Could Change Us; like her, it defies categories. But, she says, the work's emotional core will be easy for an audience to pin down.

"It's an incredible journey through a deep, loving relationship," she explains, "from the uncertainty and ecstasy of its beginning through to the domesticity, to all those really beautiful things that everyone who's been in a loving relationship has gone through.

"It's very tangible and accessible, but also an amazing body of work."